Sunday, January 10, 2010

Interesting story of Chicle (chewing gum)

In 1869 a Staten Island photographer named Thomas Adams made friends with exiled Mexican dictator Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, he of Alamo fame.

Adams noticed the old general didn’t smoke but liked to chew a plug of tree sap he called “Chicle”. Adams took the chicle and put a candy shell around it, getting rich on the invention of Gum Balls.

Santa Anna hoped the invention would finance his return to power in Mexico City but that never occurred. Gumball machines appeared in 1918, Bubble Gum in 1928.

In the same year 'inventor' William Semple of Mount Vernon Ohio received a patent for chewing gum.

Since early times frontiersmen and Indians had the habit of chewing on a piece of pine resin or sap. At 9,000 years old, the oldest chewed piece of gum was found in Sweden in a glacier in 1993. As early as 1842 Charles Curtis was selling spruce chewing gum from his home in Bangor Maine.

No comments:

Post a Comment